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JohnS

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  1. Pleased to say Rheged provided better sound quality on Thursday compared to Tuesday’s screening in Keswick. I could hear Alice’s gun without any difficulty. The tap dancing was audible throughout but sounded nothing like what I’ve heard in the four performances I’ve attended in the ROH. I’m intrigued by @Rob S’s comment above as it had never crossed my mind that that volumes/amplification on Tuesday would be different from earlier performances. But it wasn’t just a marginal reduction in volume - I thought there was a huge difference: from ff to p (and probably ppp in Keswick). I’ve had some email exchanges with Customer Services and have let them know about Thursday’s Rheged. I’ve also asked about changes in amplification/volumes in light of Rob’s comment. I’ll post any update.
  2. I saw the cinema relay in Keswick which I found sadly marred by poor sound quality. You could hardly hear the tap dancing, normally so powerful in the theatre, and the orchestral sound lacked vibrancy. In Act 1 I assumed Alice’s gun misfired but perhaps it was the poor sound quality in the cinema? I’ll be very interested to try Rheged on Thursday evening (delayed live performance) or Sunday’s encore. In the interval the Keswick staff told me the satellite technicians had visited in the morning to ensure all was well. But I can’t believe the sound was correct. I do hope it was just Keswick that had problems.
  3. The Season Guide shows Alice running from 13 June to 6 July (a Sunday). It may be the July calendar is incorrect as 6 July is blank. [The calendar has the Royal Ballet School’s Annual Performance on 13 July with performances at 12:00 and 15:00 where I guess the time hasn’t been finalised.] But having a final Alice on a Sunday, a week after the double Alice on Saturday 28 June (and a string of performances leading up to the Saturday) looks unlikely to me.
  4. I have Balcony D53 £32 going spare for the RB School’s Annual Performance this Saturday. It’s a restricted view seat but I find the seat/view/sound pretty reasonable and would have quite happily sat there had I not managed to pick up a Stalls seat which appeared when checking for returns. If interested please DM me and add a reply here. If there’s no interest I’ll return the ticket this evening.
  5. Tonight’s cast sheet and good to see a number of newly promoted dancers: https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/43/swan-lake-by-liam-scarlett/cast-list/54799
  6. Tonight’s cast list: https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/43/swan-lake-by-liam-scarlett/cast-list/54800 It would have been great to have had it an hour earlier.
  7. Many thanks @bridiem - I can see this but wouldn’t a gauze be just as evocative without muffling the music to the extent it’s unclear whether the performance has started with audience conversations continuing?
  8. For my part I don’t think it’s ever late to post and it’s been a joy to catch up on all these posts on the train. Rendezvous has been a fabulous Triple, an absolute delight. But I am also very impressed with the Short Works Triple, in part because I had no idea until Ashton Celebrated just how varied Ashton’s work is, with Hamlet & Ophelia and Sarasota’s Dante Sonata real eye openers. But why do the Brahms Waltzes begin with the curtain down - it just seems a bit unfair not to hear the music clearly from the start when so fabulously played by Kate Shipway?
  9. Mine are fine this morning and were yesterday when sorting my diary - hoping your future tickets are now in order @alison. Since the changes, when logging into My Account, I find I have to put in my name and password with two separate finger prints and then sign in. Previously one finger print was all that was needed. So it’s taking me 7 clicks to sign in rather than I think 2.
  10. I’m pleased to see my future performances are now in chronological order!
  11. Graham Boland, Customer Services Manage tells me: “Ticket history will be returning in the next few weeks. It is quite a large job for the digital team to undertake, and is a top priority for them.” He’s sent Membership and Digital departments my feedback on the other changes: the need for chronological order within each month; and my regret at the passing of those eye catching images for each production. I’m sure he’ll pass other feedback on to the relevant people.
  12. I too gave feedback yesterday as I’d actually wanted to look at my past performances and couldn’t find them. I emailed Customer Services this morning as I noticed the odd ordering in the month (which I think is purchase order). I’m hoping things will get sorted. I rather liked those glossy production images we used to get alongside the detail: I thought they added a welcome touch of RB&O quality. But the functionality is more important to get right.
  13. With seat maps published and Friends booking starting today, I’ve had a more detailed look at Autumn prices. The Royal Ballet & Opera emphasise they are attempting to align prices with the relative value of each seat according to the experience each seat gives. If a seat offers a restricted view, poorer acoustic, or is less comfortable, that should be reflected in the ticket price. View, acoustic and comfort I would have thought are independent of the production (assuming the prospect of attending the production is itself attractive). That means there should be reasonable consistency in pricing accepting that big budget productions much in demand will be higher priced than less popular productions. There may also be different financial objectives for Ballet and Opera so seat maps may differ but significant variations in pricing patterns between Ballet and Opera should as a minimum at least raise questions. The simplest way to look for pricing consistency is to compare seat prices relative to the top price for that production and that’s the approach taken when looking at experimental pricing introduced in Autumn 2023 and in the analysis below of Autumn 2024 prices. There may be more sophisticated approaches but the RB&O haven’t as yet put forward alternatives for measuring how prices reflect the relative value of the experience provided from the seat and simplicity has great merit. The table below looks at this Autumn’s Opera and Ballet main house productions ordered by the top seat price. I’ve looked at specific seats which have attracted attention in the past (for example the Stalls Circle Row B bench seats and Amphitheatre Row E sides) and added the highest priced Amphitheatre seat as it would appear further experimentation is underway. That leads to the first significant point and the greatest anomaly. Fidelio highest priced Amphitheatre seats are £152, 62% of the £245 top price. Figaro and Traviata also have a £245 top price but the highest priced Amphitheatre seats are £101, 41% of the top price. I and many others assumed the Fidelio price must be an error. But the price is confirmed and the explanation is that the RB&O are continuing to experiment with their prices. Whilst pilot testing may have merit, it rather draws attention to the extent of the experimentation where there’s a proposed 50% increase in the highest priced Amphitheatre seats. For Fidelio will audiences be prepared to pay the 50% increase when there are direct comparisons to be made in the same booking period? Should the experiment prove successful, would other productions see such increases in later booking periods? For opera, highest priced Amphitheatre seats have been charged at some 40% of the top price for the production. Ballet prices have tended to be higher relatively ie a ballet seat is a higher %age of the top price compared to opera. For example the current Swan Lake, highest priced Amphitheatre seats are £118, 67% of the £175 top price. I’ve added the current Swan Lake prices at the foot of the table as it’s worth comparing these prices with Alice/Cinderella prices (which I hope prove to be the most expensive Ballet prices in the 2024/25 Season). This Autumn there has been a slight change which I think overall is welcome (but with some important caveats). The top price for Alice/Cinderella is £190 but highest Amphitheatre seats are £114, some 60% of the top price and a £4 reduction in cash. I’ll say more about the comparison between Alice/Cinderella and Swan Lake later. So it may be that the RB&O Fidelio experiment is very much focused on opera. But disappointingly no rationale is given as to the new round of experimental pricing and what the longer term aim is. All we see are the prices and seat maps and in the absence of any explanation from the RB&O, we can look at the data, ask questions, but struggle to draw conclusions. Whilst Fidelio highest priced Amphitheatre seats is I think the most significant issue as we don’t know what might happen should the experiment be judged a success, there are a string of other pricing oddities. Hoffman is the most expensive opera with £300 top price. But some Stalls Circle bench seats are cheaper than for the three £270 operas. Hoffman bench seats are £106; for the three £270 Operas, there are two prices for bench seats, £110 and £82. Hoffman is the only opera that has just the one price for these bench seats. Hoffman Slips seats are lower priced than for the £270 and £245 operas which looks very odd. For Hoffman the best Slips seats are £39 (13% of the £300 top price). For the six operas best Slips are more than £50 (some 20% of the top price). For Hoffman Standing tickets and Upper Slips are £22 (7%). For the six operas the prices are £2 or £3 higher (some 10% of the top price). Turning to ballet, the first point to make is that Stalls Circle bench seats remain extremely high priced. For Alice/Cinderella the price is £114, the highest price for these seats across all productions. £114 is 60% of the top price. For the other ballets these bench seats are some 43% or 45% of their top price. For opera bench seats are 35% to 41% of their top price. And for all operas bar Hoffman, bench seats have two prices with the cheaper seats nearest the stage at some 30% to 33% of their top price. It seems to me that the bench seats are significantly poorer than Balcony restricted seats (eg A33) and best Amphitheatre seats but for Alice/Cinderella (and this summer’s Swan Lake), all these seats share the same £114 price (£118 for Swan Lake). I can’t see how Stalls Circle B16 bench seat, Balcony B33 and best Amphitheatre seats can possibly provide the same value or similar experience. And the RB&O recognise the differences in their pricing for these seats for all other productions. This season’s Manon bench seat prices were much fairer and more in line with Opera pricing: Balcony Central Block Restricted (eg A33) Stalls Circle Sides Bench Seats (eg B27 & B16) £99 £79 £63 71% 56% 45% But that welcome news was not extended to Swan Lake nor to Alice/Cinderella. We’ll have to see the Onegin and Romeo & Juliet prices which may perhaps be more in line with Manon than Swan Lake. There is though some welcome news when comparing Alice/Cinderella and Swan Lake. There are some marginal reductions in the cash price of some of the less expensive seats (eg £118 seats are reduced to £114 and there are similar modest reductions in other areas). Given the increase in the top price (from £175 to £190), the less expensive seats are now a lower percentage of the top price (eg from 67% to 60%) which is more in line with opera percentages. Turning to Maddaddam, there are some similarities with Dante. Top price is now £145 compared to £130. Lower priced tickets for Dante were pretty modest (Stalls Circle bench seats £80, Amphitheatre Row E £21 to £66, Slips top price £21). For Maddaddam the prices are generally a little lower than for Dante: £63; £25 to £63; and £22. And with the increase in the top price, then the lower priced seats are a smaller percentage of the top price. I don’t know what financial objective is set for MacGregor ballets but I can’t see other ballets being so modestly priced. Encounters is something of a one-off but the table if anything underlines just how modestly priced some Maddaddam seats are (eg bench seats 43% of the top price for Maddaddam rising to 60% for Encounters). I was hoping that experimental pricing might have run its course and seat maps would stabilise but that’s clearly not the case. It may well be that experimental pricing has not yet achieved its objectives given recent discounting of tickets which we hear about but don’t know the extent. I see one or two helpful movements such as the Manon bench seat pricing and some of the Alice/Cinderella pricing looks more reasonable compared with Swan Lake. But I’m afraid I don’t yet see the RB&O moving towards more settled seat maps let alone a standard seat map which would at least provide a basis for matching price to the value of the experience. ROH pricing Autumn 2024.pdf
  14. Booking worked well for me although I hadn’t twigged Alice was excluded from the multi-buy - it’s clearly set out on the deals webpage so I’ll pay more attention for Winter booking. Also the voluntary donation has changed from £3 to 4%, capped at £30. I’ve suggested it might be helpful to flag the change as I was unaware of the new practice.
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